QNA: What’s your unpopular opinion about games?

30 January 2017

By Tarryn van der Byl

Opinions, they say, are like assholes. Everybody’s got one, and it probably smells of mountain breezes, freshly baked peanut butter biscuits, and sleepy kittens snuggled up in woolly blankies. Maybe that’s just mine. Opinions are also like assholes, though, because sometimes they gape open, putrescent fumes belching forth from their convulsing, murky viscera, and shit on everything you love. And as room falls silent, and the children start to cry, clinging to mothers who watch you with wretched dismay, the thing is that Bayonetta was a rubbish game even if it’s got a 90 on Metacritic.

I’ll go first.

Violence in video games could be a legitimate problem. I don’t mean tabloid moral panic-generating stuff about games training kids to be serial murderers and whatever, but I do mean that six-year olds who blame the missing biscuits on conveniently invisible friends shouldn’t be making impulsive decisions about whether or not to let a hooker live in GTAV. It’s easy to say, oh, you know, I grew up playing video games and I’ve never bombed a shopping mall, but I also grew up with games like Asteroids and Bananoid and Bouncing Babies. Okay, Bouncing Babies was actually kind of horrifying, now that I think about it.

The point is, a lot of pre-teens now are growing up on the management end of a virtual sniper rifle. And people becoming desensitised to gratuitous graphic violence is not exactly something that some tabloid moral panic-generator made up for a headline on a FOX News Special Edition. It’s a thing that actually happens. And I wish it was something we could talk about without everybody shutting out everybody else with arguments that amount, more or less, to some vehement variation of “NO U”.

Unpopular opinion: Mass Effect etc needs less romance. I don’t care one bit for it and feel it has no place in games

Rick de Klerk

* I found Mass Effect boring and didn’t bother to play the sequels. “I’m Commander Shepard, and this is my favourite snore on the Citadull.”
* Almost all open-world titles are mechanically mediocre and get a pass because of their graphical fidelity.
* In-game chat, voiced or otherwise, should be purchasable DLC. If you want to be shitty to strangers online, you should at least have to pay for the privilege.
* Bioshock Infinite was an incredible game that’s became fashionable to slate, and it’s possibly even more relevant now that it was three years ago with regards to current world events and its treatment of Americana.

– Trying to convince my classmates that indies are cool;
– Prototype 2 was a great sequel;
– I refuse to play any FF because I want to play them ALL in order, even if they’re unrelated to one another.

Michael Bouwer

– I couldn’t play more than 7 hours of the Witcher 3 because the movement mechanics got super annoying.
– Smaller, successful games like Terraria deserve more recognition and coverage than embarassing AAA games like The Division.
– Fallout 4 may have been a bad Fallout game, but it is still hella fun.

Tank Muller

There was some kind of camera setting in The Witcher 3 that made the game damned near unplayable for me for a long time. When I finally figured out which setting it was and disabled it, GOTY.

Michael Bouwer

Looks like I’m gonna have to download it again 🙁

Tank Muller

You owe it to yourself to give it another go, especially if you haven’t fiddled around with the camera and movement settings yet to find what works best for you.

Bayonetta was the game of that console generation. Nothing better came out.

LazyDemoni

I sometimes feel that I could be doing more productive and beneficial things (for myself and others) instead of just playing games. I love games but recently I’ve had to acknowledge this uncomfortable truth.

Eric Backeberg

– The Uncharted Series is average at best with a terrible plot and shitty characters.
– I don’t care if Half-Life 3 ever comes out.
– Having more powerful hardware has made developers lazy.

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